A Time For Reflection Upon What The Mass Is Really All About

By JAMES MONTI

It has been for several weeks now that for many of us life as we have known it has come to a grinding halt. It is a more silent world than most of us have ever known. This silence and stillness have descended upon nearly everything, from our places of work to our churches.
The current pandemic has compelled many of us to step back from the onward rush of daily life and contemplate more intently the things that eternally matter. Strangely enough, in the agonizing absence of the public celebration of Holy Mass, there is an opportunity to come to a deeper understanding of the sacred liturgy, to a more profound penetration of its sacrosanct mysteries. Our God has always known how to bring good out of evils and misfortunes, and the current crisis is no exception.
In those places where prudent and conscientious pastors have kept their churches open for visits to the Blessed Sacrament and private prayer, there is a hidden treasure to be discovered. For there is something profoundly powerful about silence in the sanctuary of God. In the absence of the liturgical actions at the altar, we find ourselves intimately confronted by the simple truth of the Divine Presence in the Blessed Sacrament.
In his book The Power of Silence, His Eminence Robert Cardinal Sarah has described silence in the context of the Holy Eucharist as “an acoustic veil that protects the mystery” of the Blessed Sacrament, for “what is precious always remains veiled” (The Power of Silence, San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2017, p. 126).
In a church near where I live, there is a simple but beautiful traditional mural of the Crucifixion spanning the ceiling behind the high altar and the tabernacle. The church dates from 1896, and the style of the mural suggests it has been there from the beginning. Suspended from the ceiling directly over the tabernacle is a large exquisitely wrought red sanctuary lamp. On three Sundays when I found the church open, Passion Sunday, Easter Sunday, and Divine Mercy Sunday, the hours of uninterrupted silence and stillness seemed to impart to the sanctuary a particularly solemn aura, capable of permeating the soul with an enduring sense of the sacred.
The visitors to the church were few, but those who did stop by seemed captivated by the atmosphere of mystery there, including a mother and her young daughter, who when they were not praying spoke to each other only in the most hushed whispers.
It occurred to me that at least a few of those who did visit on Easter Sunday could be from the very large number of non-practicing Catholics who only venture into a church for Mass just twice a year, for Christmas and Easter Sunday.
Having perhaps only experienced the interior of a Catholic church when it was packed with people and with deplorably loud talking before and after Mass, the sacred silence when finding oneself on this Easter Sunday alone before the Blessed Sacrament must have seemed an entirely new experience. If up until now they have perceived going to church for Christmas and Easter as merely a “feel good” family get-together, this quiet “face-to-face” encounter with God may have been for at least some of them a moment of conversion, an opportunity to re-examine their priorities in life.
None of this is meant to suggest in the least that our current situation of not being able to attend Mass is a desirable one. But I do think that this crisis can be a potent teaching moment for realizing the need we all have to work harder to stress and cultivate a truly fruitful interior participation in the Mass.
The absence of public celebrations of the Mass has driven home the reality that the Mass is ultimately not about “gathering,” or “sharing,” or “celebrating diversity.” It is not dependent upon the presence of the “gathered Christian community” for its valid confection. It is the holy and sacrosanct sacrifice of the Son of God re-presented daily for the salvation and sanctification of the world. That sacrifice has continued to sanctify our world daily even in our absence.
Just over a century ago, the Catholic Church in the United States was in very much the same situation that we find ourselves now. In the autumn of 1918 the pandemic known as the Spanish flu was ravaging the country and claiming the lives of thousands. The emergency measures of civil authorities were very much the same as what we have seen in 2020, including the closure of non-essential businesses, bans on public assemblies of more than ten people, the donning of face masks, etc. In many cities (Philadelphia, Richmond, Cincinnati, Rochester, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Dallas, Birmingham, Utah City, Monterey, Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, etc.) there were mandatory closures of places of worship, including Catholic churches.
When in October of 1918 the public safety commissioner of Rochester, N.Y., issued a closure order that encompassed all places of worship, the city’s Catholic Bishop Thomas Hickey (1861-1940) told the faithful in a published statement:
“The world is experiencing a condition possibly unprecedented in the rapid spread of a disease that has affected not only military camps, but also many persons in civilian life. . . .
“We have felt in this matter as is our practice under similar conditions that the mayor of the city and the duly constituted officers for municipal welfare, have the responsibility of determining any action which is to be taken and we have no desire to interfere with them in the discharge of that duty.
“The closing of the Catholic churches on Sunday and the consequent inability of Catholics to assist at Mass and thus discharge their obligation in conscience, is a most serious and unusual procedure….The responsibility of closing the churches has been taken by the proper authorities of the city and we are prepared to obey it. . . .
“Let the prayers for Mass be said at home in union with the holy sacrifice at the altar, and let [the faithful] pray to the God of tender love and compassion for our spiritual needs and for our bodily welfare” (“Catholic Churches Close; Bishop issues Statement,” Rochester Times-Union, October 12, 1918, p. 8 — accessed from University of Michigan, https://www.influ
enzaarchive.org).
In Birmingham, Ala., where during October of 1918 the city government enacted a similar church closure order, the Birmingham News invited the clergy of all the city’s religious denominations to pen sermons to their people for publication in the newspaper. Fr. James Edwin Coyle (1873-1921), pastor of Birmingham’s largest Catholic church and future cathedral, St. Paul’s, rose to the occasion with two newspaper homilies that are as inspiring now as they were when first printed over a century ago.
Fr. Coyle realized that some of his readers were likely to be curious non-Catholics, so he fully availed himself of a unique opportunity not only to bolster the faith of his own flock but also to explain what the Mass is and why Catholics were pining for it in its absence:
“You are for the first time in your lives deprived of the opportunity of hearing Mass on Sunday, and you will, I trust from this very circumstance, appreciate more thoroughly what Holy Mass is for the Catholics. Sunday service is no mere gathering for prayer….No, there is something else that draws the Catholics, to the wonderment of non-Catholics, from their warm homes on cold bleak winter dawns to trample through snow-covered streets in their thousands and hundreds of thousands to a crowded church. . . . What draws the multitude?
“The Mass, the unutterable sweetness of the Mass. Nothing human could draw, but the Mass is the God-given sacrifice offered the Creator. It is Holy Thursday come down and Calvary made present today. Mass is God really and truly present on our Catholic altars. . . .
“Yes, the Mass is the center of Catholic worship. It is the Mass that matters. . . . What a glorious history the history of the Mass! See it offered in the first centuries, in the catacombs over the bodies of martyrs by men who themselves will be martyred tomorrow….See, in Ireland an entire people kept true to Patrick’s faith by the Mass. See Columbus and his men, kneeling at Mass on the early morn of the day, when they sailed away from Palos, to lift forever the mists from the Atlantic, and to win half a world for God.
“Ah, brethren, let us today reflect on the meaning and the history of that great sacrifice at which we may not assist, a sacrifice that links us with the saints and the sages of every age from Christ’s time till now, and let us beg God in his mercy to remove from us that sickness that keeps us deprived of the great sacrifice, so that soon we may again with glad, worshipful hearts, meet in our churches and assist in offering to the All High that clean oblation, seen by the prophet Malachy in vision, that sacrifice that is offered in every place from the rising to the set[ting] of sun” (“An Address to Catholics,” Birmingham News, October 13, 1918, p. 11 — accessed from University of Michigan, https://www.influenzaarchive.org).

The Ultimate Price

In a second newspaper sermon published later that month, Fr. Coyle speaks movingly of the deep piety of Birmingham’s Catholics that he had personally witnessed in happier times, their frequenting of the confessional and their crowding the altar rails to receive Holy Communion. So he knew well their hunger for what had now been withdrawn from them. Intent upon raising their spirits, he writes:
“It is certain as good comes from every evil, that a deeper appreciation of the holy sacrifice will result from this necessary legislation. How true it is that we never really appreciate our blessings till deprived of the same for a season. . . . [Birmingham Catholics] grieve and hope and pray that the time of exile will be short, and that soon again daily Mass and daily Communion will bring some of Heaven’s brightness into their daily lives. . . . Darkness in a sense is at present over the face of the city. May there soon be a fiat lux” (“Let there be light”) (“A Message to Catholics,” October 20, 1918, reprinted in Birmingham News, April 18, 2020, posted online at AL.com).
Less than three years later, Fr. Coyle was to pay the ultimate price for the faith he had professed so eloquently. On August 11, 1921 he was gunned down on the front porch of his rectory by a Ku Klux Klansman enraged that the priest had received into the Catholic Church the man’s daughter and had presided at her wedding to a Puerto Rican Catholic.
Let us all remember the bold and noble witness of Fr. Coyle to the priceless majesty of the Mass as we eagerly await the return of light to all our churches.